Comment by ericol | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericol | Hacker News Reader

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> the disadvantage is when you try to add new features or build a new site you haven’t learned anything

I don't have an example to prove you wrong here, but here's my 2 cents:

1. You could probably decompose the app in different parts, and then put everything together. Even thought my experience with React is nill, I do (Think I do) have the expertise and know-how to glue everything together (It is yet to be proven that Claude cannot do this). 2. I obviously don't think it can replace a Sr. Dev (yet) but for somebody with my expertise, this is a very good starting point. It saves you 2.5 hours... Every. Single. Time. 3. This is ground zero (sort of). In the words of the famous Tank from The Matrix... This is loco.

So I have used it in the way you’re describing for coding a backend service in Rust. I had never used rust before and I was just trying to see how easy it would be.

The good part is you can get the minimum viable product of every feature up every time. The bad part is when you run into bugs you can’t debug it yourself because you haven’t built up the mental model of how the system works since you’re just copying and pasting. The more unique your problem gets (once you’re out the hello world zone of problems) the worse the AI is at helping you. The first few times you run into a simple debugging and the AI figures it out for you it’s pretty cool but the frequent times the AI gets stuck in a loop and you spend hours feeding it debug output after debug output and it still being broken makes you hate this workflow.

So yes it does help you rapidly build the features but at the same time there’s an immense amount of additional work needed to maintain and debug the system. Also the code is generally very poorly structured and architected.

So yea impressive stuff at a surface level and great for speeding up your ability to get started on a task. But really bad to rely on it (at this point) for anything of greater complexity than the basic quick start tutorial of your library of choice (in my experience).

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